Agamben says, “The Church has lost the messianic experience of time that defines it and is one with it. The time of the messiah cannot designate a chronological period or duration but, instead, must represent nothing less than a qualitative change in how time is experienced.”
He contrasts the messianic notion of time with that of the apocalyptic. The apocalyptic can only point to the end of times–which will certainly happen sooner or later depending on how much patience you have. I’m not so presumptuous to think it will happen in my lifetime, although I see challenges ahead. More likely, it may be when the sun burns out while a bunch of AI’s are running the show. The posture Agamben brings in is not to wait for a historical dialectic of progress, or for the Messiah to come and redeem. As such, the focus of the Church should not be on the imminent ultimate, but the transcendent penultimate: thus transforming the experience of time to live in the Eternal NOW!
He says, “To experience this time [in this way] implies an integral transformation of ourselves and of our ways of living.”
He even points to Paul’s position on this view,
It is with this in mind that Paul reminds the Thessalonians, 'About dates and times, my friends, we need not write to you, for you know perfectly well that the Day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night' (1 Thess5.l-2; 262).1 In this passage 'comes [ercheta] is in the present tense, just as in the Gospels the messiah is called ho erchomenos, 'he who comes'- that is, he who never ceases to come. Having perfectly understood Paul's meaning, Walter Benjamin once wrote that, 'every day, every instant, is the small gate through which the messiah enters.'
Time takes us to the end, and yet we can end our customary image of time and liberate ourselves from it. What interests Paul (and Agamben) is not the last day or the end of time, but the time of the end—the inner transformation of time that the messianic event has produced!
Agamben says in another related book,
The paradox of the Church is that, for the eschatological point of view, it must renounce the world, but it cannot do this because, form the point of view of the economy, it is of the world, which it cannot renounce without renouncing itself. But this is exactly where the decisive crisis is situated: because courage…is nothing but the capacity to keep oneself connected with one’s own end.
This lack of courage creates a bland humanitarianism that delegitimizes the messianic vocation of the Church and overemphasizes bureaucratic legalism of the institution. The Church becomes supernaturally dry, aimless in its ontological moorings, and fragile from internal corruption like most secular institutions. In kneeling before the world, it begins to fall from religious relevance.
I’m reading another terrific book on The Idol of Our Age (which by the way is not Taylor Swift—not yet anyways—but secular humanitarianism) in which the author makes this relevant point,
The Christian God is both transcendent and incarnate. He promises something much more precious than bread and circuses, or even social justice, which in its quasi-socialist forms is inseparable from an excessive passion for equality, and even an encouragement of envy. We must not confuse sincere love of the poor, an undeniably great injunction of the Gospel, with a humanitarian or socialist political project to bring about heaven on Earth. That is the dangerous path pursued by Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who remains so far from the authentic spirit of the Gospel.
The heaven on Earth project, as noted by Agamben, should not be a political one but a deeply spiritual one. By severing our ties with messianic time, we undermine our sense of reality and capacity to be enchanted with temporal reality. We attempt to control the temporal at the expense of given freedom of the Eternal. We sojourn as disembodied beings buffered by time and space, instead of foreigners always available to inhabit our true home.